Queer African Reader

A richness of voices, a multiplicity of discourses, a quiverful of arguments. African queers writing for each other, theorising ourselves, making our movements visible. This is a book we have hungered for.

All too often we read about African queers as monolithically victimised or as passive recipients of modernity from the West. What a great antidote the Queer African Reader provides to that narrative, with its diversity of styles, stories, memoirs, scholarly theory, art, photography and deliciously combative polemics and petitions as rich as the diversity of Africans themselves! Listen to the poetry, feel the passion – love, rage, sadness, pride – admire the beauty, grow from the insights of Africans speaking directly to us about their struggles to be true to themselves, to their families, their lovers, their nations. This brave volume should be essential reading for all human rights activists far and wide in Africa and the diaspora.

The Queer African Reader is a revelatory, path-breaking collection of writings drawn from across the continent and its diaspora. Ekine and Abbas have achieved a huge task in compiling and editing so many contributors who courageously share what it means to inhabit the precarious space that opens up between the patriarchal heteronormative regimes of the past and the radical possibilities heralded by so many personal-political struggles for sexual freedom. The Queer African Reader offers

Long awaited and overdue, written amidst burn-out and premature death, in the front lines of empire and gender violence, this first collection by queer Africans is no quick or easy read. The Queer African Reader demonstrates that urgency was never an excuse to leave anyone behind: unlike the depressingly streamlined movements of the global/ising North, it has ample space for impossible subjects that complicate the single story and expand who belongs in the movement and what it demands